How to Choose the Right IoT Platform for Your Industrial Business

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The IoT platform is the brain of your IoT network. It manages data flows, analyzes data to produce actionable insights, and supports the development of applications. With hundreds of options on the market, though, how do you decide on the best platform for your industrial business? 

Here are nine evaluation criteria and questions to ask IoT platform vendors to make the best possible decision based on your current usage — and potential future growth.

1. E2E (Exchange-to-Exchange) Security

IoT is widely acknowledged to be every organization’s weakest spot in terms of cybersecurity, with hackers exploiting device vulnerability to gain access to critical systems. For this reason, cybersecurity should be the first topic raised with any IoT platform vendor.

Questions to ask platform vendors:

• How secure is the platform in terms of data exchange and device authentication?
• Does the platform provide end-to-end data encryption?
• What authentication methods and encryption ciphers does the platform use?
• Does it offer management tools for certificate provisioning?
• Does it provide role-based ACL (Access Control Layers) and access logging?
• Does it have enough RAM and processing power to perform advanced security functions, such as certificates, decryption, and encryption?
• What sort of disaster recovery does the platform offer? How often is data backup taken, and how long are backups kept for?

2. Scalability

Scalability means the ease with which your organization can grow from 100 to 100,000 connected devices or “endpoints.” 

Questions to ask platform vendors:

• How does the platform manage the complexity of handling an increasing number of connected devices?
• What level of latency occurs as the load increases?
• How many endpoints can the platform handle in a single geography, and how many can it handle across multiple geographies?
• What is the highest number of connected nodes you currently handle with your biggest customer?
• Bandwidth: what is the largest data pipe this platform could handle today, and is there room to grow?

3. Usability

How user-friendly is the interface? Usability isn’t just about simplicity; it’s also important in terms of reducing the time and costs required to train and onboard staff.

Ensure that the data model and interface hasn’t been designed with one industry-specific scenario in mind and that it can be adapted to other use cases. For example, an IoT platform designed for use in a medical facility may be inappropriate in a manufacturing setting.

Questions to ask platform vendors:

• What level of technical support is available, and what costs are involved?
• What training or onboarding will be required for users?

4. Interoperability

Interoperability refers to systems downstream of the IoT platform, such as your existing workflows and ERP tools.

Questions to ask platform vendors:

• Does the platform support integration with [your ERP tool]?
• Can it integrate with third-party providers and services, and what levels of latency are experienced?
• Can it integrate with open-source tools such as [the ones you currently use or plan to use]?
• Can it work with any computing language, or do its premade libraries work better with particular languages?
• If common protocols such as HTTP or MQTT will not suffice, can the system handle [your specific protocol]?

5. Modularity

IoT modules are the building blocks that sense, collect, store, and transmit data. Modularity in an IoT platform means picking and choosing the functionalities you need to design your own industrial applications.

Questions to ask platform vendors:

• Does the platform use a modular approach or micro-services architecture?
• Is it compatible with third-party modules?

6. Degree of Open Source

Ideally, an IoT platform will be vendor and technology agnostic. An open-source approach will help avoid vendor lock-in, giving businesses the flexibility to switch to another vendor if necessary.

Questions to ask platform vendors:

• Does the platform use fully documented external APIs (application programming interface)?
• Does the platform support agnostic application enablement?
• How does its source code escrow work? Will maintenance be easily transferable to another company if your business ceases to exist in the future?

7. Edge Capabilities

Edge processing means the platform can make autonomous decisions locally without delegating the decision to the cloud. This is a preferred approach when the processing of data is time-sensitive, or if the facility is located in an area with limited or no cloud connectivity.

While pushing the workload to the cloud is fairly standard, it causes challenges including latency, network bandwidth, reliability, security, and more.

Questions to ask platform vendors:

• Does the platform support offline processing of data in edge gateway nodes?
• Can the platform be used equally in a cloud, fog, or mist environment?

8. Multi-cloud Option

A multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud approach means having mission-critical business processes managed by on-premises IT systems for speed and security, while public-facing or less-critical operations are managed by a cloud platform.

Questions to ask platform vendors:

• Alongside the cloud service, does the platform offer integration with the on-premises IT system?
• What support is available for a multi-cloud backend to ensure the exchange of data sets between platforms is not hindered?

9. Pre-configured Solution

A pre-configured solution enables the acceleration of IoT projects to get started much earlier than if IoT devices have to be connected to the platform manually. Preconfigured solutions are usually offered by vendors who provide a total IoT package — including a hub, digital twins of devices, and gateway software.

Questions to ask platform vendors:

• How much time would be saved by using a pre-configured solution?
• What are the costs involved?

The Big Three

If this seems a lot to consider, at the very least use the top three purchasing criteria to choose an IoT platform: security, scalability, and usability.

Image Credit: Thomas Industry Update